How the CD lost its sheen - a 30 year tale of rise and fall

What has proven to be more ideally suited to "today's high demanding, on the go lifestyle??"

Not saying it's better...but people actually BUY mp3s!! They PAY FOR 'EM!!

BLOWS MY MIND. STILL.

Yeah I'd do it if I could swing it.

I just don't have time.

I've taped so many live shows...only time I listen to them in 24/96 these days is when I'm tranferring/mastering :\

 

Amen.

 

It was hard for me to get over the idea that my stuff wasn't there where I could see it, but once I understood the advantages of having it all available at the push of a button it would be difficult to go back.

 

We can argue about this for decades but the reality is young people do not find cds convenient enough for their living habits.

Those who bought cd's in the 80's are probably still buying them today. Youngsters play with computers all day and guess what... music can be stored and played there as easily. No way they are gonna go n' buy a cd-player just to collect a bunch of plastic discs. They are probably not gonna go and buy a cd-player later in life either.

Cars have usb-ports and can play music directly from your mobile phone so no need.

 

Ok.

No. What ruined music sales is the proliferation of crap music AND music that sounds like crap *there's a difference.

Why buy crap when you can pay exactly what you think it's worth??

 

Where do the files on their phone come from, then??

 

I still like having the physical discs available as backup, but most discs get used exactly once when I rip the files to a server and are then filed away. CDs only hold 750MB, so they're a horrible backup medium.

I like the physical releases because I get the liner notes and artwork but I rarely look at them more than once, if that.

I can see myself completely abandoning the format when the artists I like stop issuing new releases.

 

Not files nescesarily, streaming works fine through the mobile phone. Files can be downloaded from Itunes or HDTracks.

 

It was a hypothetical. I'm not a big fan of stream quality though.

 

I was at Barnes & Noble today and really marvelled at how strongly they're pushing vinyl. I saw albums that cost $5-$8 brand new on CD going for over $20 on vinyl and some closer to $30. I don't think the price difference is worth it no matter what. CDs are king in my eyes when it comes to physical media for music.

 

We'll see how long the vinyl bubble lasts.

 

Great article, thank you for sharing it with us. My only regret is that they don't put enough emphasis on the fact that all major labels were sold to big corporations when cd's started to be real profitable, thus putting accountants at the head of the music business instead of music lovers. Sony instead of Ahmet. I can't help but think that music men would probably have reacted more pro-actively to the different music sources. Just a tought...

 

Actually many labels have a history of being tied to hardware and being cutting edge, whether Edison and Paramount who made records to sell machines/cabinets to EMI/HMV who for decades were major hardware players to RCA, Toshiba, Denon and later Sony, plus many more, hardware and music to play on it have gone hand in hand as long as the industry has existed. In the UK we never really took to cassettes so we replaced an excellent format, vinyl, with a different format, CD, which we were told was better, but many people disagreed, either way the whole download thing was about convenience and not quality, yes Apple did a fantastic job of exploiting it and making hardware to play digital files, but that wasn't a forgone conclusion and the record labels dropped the ball with Napster, with iTunes and many things since. The reason CDs sold like hot cakes is because people bought into the idea of perfect sound forever and believed they were upgrading from their records, brilliant marketing, I bought up the record collections people sold off back then and now I sell those same people records to replace their CD collections now they've realised the error of their ways. The cost of manufacturing CDs plummeted whilst the retail prices remained high, this gave record labels several years of lining their pockets, I believe they should have reduced prices and sold a lot more CDs, building up a bigger customer base and making the market much more resilient in the twenty first century when the internet came into play. When it comes to charging too much and giving things away, yes they really did, you could go in HMV and pay £10+ for a DVD, or get the same title free with your Sunday paper, the same for CDs, not the first or the last time the music and film industries have demonstrated a split personality, not surprisingly this lead many customers to question why prices were so high.

 

What different music sources are you referring to?

 

knowing the fact that they degrade everytime i play them is the main reason i newer really jumped on board.

I like to be able to play the same track ten times in a row without being worried about the consequences of doing that. With digital i can!

I do however own a record-player and 300-400 albums.

 

Hopefully bursting soon.






My cheap little secret isn't anymore.

 

Surely, RCA and Paramount had separate divisions for hardware and music talent, though. We don't expect different Sony divisions like talent and hardware to work together to develop a whiz bang music player like Apple. It is much easier for Apple, who has been making user friendly gadgets and computers for twenty or thirty years, to develop their own player. Sony had an interest in selling CDs, because they were extremely profitable for the company. Why innovate in a direction away from your bread and butter when you can innovate in a way that adds value to an existing and successful model?

 

Lower prices don't make CDs more resilient to competition from iTunes. People buy iTunes files because they can add them to their phone or device more easily than buying a CD.

 

Yepp, ripping is painful, more convenient for them to have digital-files to begin with.

 

Paramount was started by a chair company so they had musical product to go with their cabinets, the 45rpm single came about because RCA did combine it's hardware and software divisions, back in the early to late twentieth century those big companies were much better integrated, a company like EMI would have music and electronics on the same site and would take the needs of both into account. I think Sony started it's rise by making user friendly music playing gadgets, firstly small transistor radios and then the cassette walkman, where would cassette sales have been without that.

 

I don't disagree with all the crap, but every era was filled with crap. You can put one hell of a sheen on crap, but in the end, it is still crap.

 

Lower CD prices at a much earlier point would have seen market growth, a much larger entrenched market and user base would be better able to resist downloads, lower CD prices may also have appealed to a younger market delaying the growth of downloads by at least a generation, the large labels failed to get enough people invested in CDs as THE format, a large part of that is down to high unit costs for which there was no need and were purely down to greed.

 

The proof that the labels viewed CD as a portable medium is right in the compression that they started using for CDs starting around 1989-1993. If it wasn't a portable medium, then they never would have seen fit to compress the recordings in mastering as they had.

 

Compression was introduced to make CDs sound louder on the radio, it has zero to do with portability, in the UK CDs were never marketed as a portable format, even electronic companies like Sony didn't really push the Discman concept.

 

Everybody had a CD player. There was no more entrenching that the labels could do. Also, you aren't going to delay the growth of downloads if people don't care about higher sound quality in the first place. People in general don't like to collect CDs. They just want the music, which the convenience of iTunes gives them. It has nothing to do with greed and everything to do with convenience.